Simon Frankau's blog
DIY laptop case
I've finally finished the DIY laptop case project that I'd been working on, and moreover had the time to recover from it.
The plan was to create a fabric case for my ancient Macbook Air, with the external cover using pinstripe fabric at an angle, and the inside using a patchwork of Clarissa Hulse fabric.
Overall, I'm pretty happy about the result, although I'll admit the quality of work's not great:
After comparing a few alternatives, the design I used came from here. I decided on a plastic zip so as not to damage the notebook, and learnt far too much about the varieties of zip design before promptly forgetting it all. I decided to go for a nice chunky zip in bright orange as a bit of a contrast to quiet pin-stripe.
Anyway, I was never going to produce a result as good as someone with proper sewing experience, and as I'm making a one-off the lessons I learnt are somewhat lost, but I really wanted to create my design myself, and, well, it was an interesting learning experience. :)
Here are some things I learnt:
- Working with fabric is hard. Constructing something that's the right shape from wood might be difficult, but when the material keeps changing shape, scrunching up, stretching, etc., it's a right pain.
- Also, you're kind of expected to create more complex shapes - the fabric will have changes of direction and rounded corners, whereas with other materials you can just leave it all nice and square. In short, smooth corners are hard.
- Clarissa Hulse fabric off-cuts patch-worked together produced the effect I wanted. We considered the fabric for curtains, but big, expensive silk curtains would have been destroyed by the children by now, so not doing that was a good move.
- Chunky zips are a right pain. They want to lie flat. They certainly don't want to be part of a 180 degree turn-around at the edge of the case. They come with chunky strips of heavy-duty material attached, in order to zip big, heavy things effectively, and that's really bad for this kind of application. I trimmed off what I could, especially at the ends, which helped somewhat.
- Don't let people close. The finishing, especially around the corners of the zip, is bad.
Despite all that, it was a fun project.
Posted 2015-08-15.